'Countryfile’ presenter Julia Bradbury talks about her 'miracle’ baby and how
his birth helped her parents’ recovery from cancer.

This Mother’s Day will have extra significance for the 41-year-old Countryfile presenter Julia Bradbury. This time last year, she was five-months pregnant with a baby she had thought she might never conceive.

But excitement was tainted with huge anxiety: her own beloved mother was about to undergo treatment for bowel cancer, and Bradbury feared she might never meet her longed-for grandchild.

“It had been a horrible couple of years,” Bradbury says now. “Mum was going into treatment for her cancer, and Dad was being treated for prostate cancer. Mum should have recognised her symptoms, but she hates doctors and looking after Dad meant she could put it off. She was bloated, but kept saying, 'I’m sure it’s just the potatoes.’ It was awful; a very, very scary time.”

A brisk, no-nonsense type, with the steamroller aura of the women who built the empire, Bradbury is relentlessly positive and not one for emoting. She is far keener to dwell on the good place the Bradburys are in now, rather than the darkness of 12 months ago. Her parents are both in recovery and she has a “miracle baby” in the form of Zephyr, now seven months. The family is spending today together, at Bradbury’s country pile in Rutland.

“Mother’s Day will be special – but no more so than other days because I speak to my Mum every day. I love that unconditional love you have with your family. But of course I’ll be reflecting on the obvious thing: the fact that this time last year I didn’t have a little being who was completely reliant on me to love, nurture and protect. Although it sounds like a cliché, I was unprepared for the joy that would bring me.”

Bradbury is certain her pregnancy helped her parents’ recovery. “It definitely gave them a focus. My mum’s been on at me to have children since I was 20. At Zeph’s christening, she said: 'It’s 15 years too late, but you’re here now…’”

Certainly, for years, it looked like Bradbury – or “the walking man’s crumpet” to her many admirers – was conforming to the stereotype of the career girl who’d forgotten to have a baby. She had presented everything from Top Gear to the wildly popular Wainwright Walks, before ending up in her current slot on Sunday night’s Countryfile.

Yet at nearly 40, she was still single and, having been diagnosed years earlier with endometriosis, a condition affecting the womb lining, she was resigned to the fact she might never become a mother.

Meeting her now, there are no hints of any changes in the status quo. Drinking tea in a very un-Countryfile-ish west-London restaurant, she is a wiry size 10 (“I haven’t been to the gym since Zeph was born, and I don’t want to either”), and disgustingly perky for someone was back at work just two months after giving birth.

Two months! Well, Amanda Holden was judging Britain’s Got Talent less than three weeks after nearly dying in childbirth. But still… don’t these women hanker for six months of Monkey Music and swapping nappy tips with sleep-deprived mamas in Starbucks?

“In the world of television, you never know which projects will get the green light,” Bradbury shrugs. After all, just a day after her 33-hour labour, she was at home hosting her birthday lunch for 25 people. So, when filming started for The Great British Countryside, 10 weeks later, no one was surprised to see her clocking in as usual with her newborn in a sling.

“I was breast-feeding, so I had to feed Zeph every three hours or use a breast pump,” she chortles. “There were quite a few moments with me sitting in the front seat of a parked car with a shawl over me and the pump making that awful noise. People were looking, thinking: 'Is that Julia Bradbury?’ and I was saying: 'Ha ha, yes! Hello!’ By the time Zeph was four-months old, he’d been to Malham Cove, to Loch Lomond, the South Downs, the Yorkshire Dales. He’d done it all.”

For all the gung-ho-ness, Bradbury admits motherhood has altered her. “Your outlook does completely change. I used to bound down mountains like a goat, without much thought. But that changes when there’s a baby bound to you in a papoose. Every step you treat with more caution.”

Despite this softening, Bradbury is unapologetic about her speedy return to work. She’s now back at Countryfile, usually spending one night a week away from Zeph. “I’d be a bad mum if I didn’t work. I need that extra stimulation.”

It helps, she says, that her Greek mother Chrissi ran a fashion business. “I was very lucky, being brought up in a loving, nurturing environment. I don’t think it’s a choice between working or being there for your child. You have to get the balance right but you can do both.”

She’s helped by the doting grandparents, a live-in nanny, and her 52-year-old partner Gerard Cunningham, a property developer she has known for 20 years. “He’s completely hands-on and a very happy daddy.”

There are no plans to marry. “I’ve nothing against the institution, it’s just nothing to do with me.” Does she want a sibling for Zephyr? “Of course, now I say: 'Oh, I should have started years ago!’ But, no, the focus now is just on Zeph and making sure I’m a professional at work and a good mum, too.”

The daughter of a British steel executive, Bradbury had an “idyllic” childhood, growing up in a rambling old rectory in Derbyshire. She left school at 16 and, over the past 20 years, has worked for every terrestrial channel, most notoriously featuring in an episode of Come Dine With Me in which she and Christopher Biggins got uproariously drunk, while Edwina Currie looked on with pursed lips.

“My proudest moment was when Christopher’s partner told me: 'You made him sick – he hasn’t been sick from alcohol in 20 years!’ There can’t be many people who’ve made Biggins throw up. But clearly I am never going to have a party ever again, now I am a mummy.”

But it was only being diagnosed with endometriosis that made Bradbury think about children in the first place. “It was a very realistic prospect that I wouldn’t be able to have my own, and then you do start thinking about your options. But I didn’t dwell on it.”

She had other concerns in any case. Three years ago the BBC decided to revamp Countryfile, moving it from Sunday mornings on BBC Two to evenings on BBC One, and Bradbury was selected, along with Matt Baker, as one of the main presenters. Great news for her, but not for the four presenters they replaced – including 53-year-old Miriam O’Reilly, who successfully sued the BBC for age discrimination.

“The whole thing was handled badly,” says Bradbury. “I’ve been fired and I’ve been replaced, by people older and younger than me. If you have longevity, you’re lucky.”

She and Baker now attract eight million viewers a week, and the pair are great friends. “He’s coming round for Zeph cuddles tonight.”

So will the BBC age curse strike Bradbury eventually? “There is no question; there aren’t enough older women on television. My ambition is to track polar bears in the North Pole, if they’re both still here, when I’m 85, like Sir David Attenborough. But we’re not yet at the stage where an 83-year-old woman would be allowed to present Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday night.”

Still, if anyone’s going to be scaling peaks in a walking frame, while pushing grandchildren in a buggy, I’d put money on the redoubtable Bradbury.